What do you want to know first when you come to the forum?

I watched them. I also remember Jeff commenting in a Podcast that he was surprised (at the time) at how many people were watching it. I suppose that's tailed off now as most existing members who wanted to watch it did already and most people who happen upon the site for the first time don't care about the right way to do things. Just like most newbies probably don't read the posting guidelines. I know I didn't. It was probably a year after I signed up before I read them. :)

I've been using the last unread post icon for eons. In fact I use that type of link on all the forums I visit--I'd probably have committed suicide by now if I had to manually search each thread for the last post.

Heh.

However, I never really noticed the 'Recent' link to view all recently active threads. Gonna have to try that out...might cut a few more seconds off my browsing time. :)

Kick The Sky said:
The only thing I really want is a link to the most recent posts near the top of the main page instead of hidden as an afterthought on the bottom of the main page.

There's a 'Recent' link at the top of each page in the forums, Bob. Is that what you're asking for?

Right now I always access http://coasterbuzz.com/Forums/Default.aspx every time I go to CoasterBuzz. I'm probably going to bookmark the link http://coasterbuzz.com/Forums/Recent.aspx and use that from now on.

Jeff said:
Regarding the photo order, in my experience it uploads in the order that I select them in the file dialog. In fact, it does that pretty reliably. In my case I'm using Chrome, and I did the test in Windows.

I just downloaded Chrome and tried it on my Windows XP machine. I still have the ordering issue. You can see the files are in order while in the queue do upload. But once they are uploaded they are like the Jumble® in the morning newspaper.

Vater said:

There's a 'Recent' link at the top of each page in the forums, Bob. Is that what you're asking for?

Nope, just the main page. I know about it being on the top of all the forum pages. I like the idea for a bookmark to the recent posts page, BUT, I do like to look at new headlines first.

Sounds like you want to be in two places at once. :)

Actually the old main page listed both, didn't it?

(for the record, I argued for keeping it that way :) )

Bookmarking the 'recent' link still works though because all new news items are shown as as 'new' under the 'recent' link as well.

Kinda skimmed through this topic, so if this has already been suggested, my apologies, but I think it would be very beneficial if the main navigation at the top of every page had a little pull-down sub-menu when my mouse/arrow hovers over the “forums” link. That way I can easily access general buzz, trip reports, news discussions, ect. without having to visit the actual “roller coaster forum” page. Basically it would save everyone a step and let them get straight to a specific forum category from the home page, or any page on the site.

For the record, I wasn't asking about CoasterBuzz, only the forum, as if it were a standalone app.

The problem with the old home page is that 95% of what was on it was never clicked on. So I went with a less is more approach. Now, 94% of what's there is never clicked on, but at least the search engines find it to be more optimized. :)

OK, so back on subject.

The things I look for when I first come to the forum are:

1 - Whether or not a thread I have been following has any new comments.

2 - New Threads

3 - New Comments on my photos

4 - New Podcast. I list this last because I know that it's usually out either late Sunday or sometime Monday and know when to check for it without looking every time I visit.

1 - Whether or not a thread I have been following has any new comments.

2 - New Threads

3 - New Comments on my photos

This is basically me too.

Me too.

Oops, did I violate the TOS? - perhaps you should force users like me to accept them for each visit. ;)

LOL, I almost posted "And that's my Me Too post of the year", but didn't.

Jason Hammond said:
Using the search feature doesn't really help you find an individual post.

This. Please fix search. There are often times I'd like to find a particular post, but as you know, searching for keywords within that post simply returns the entire thread as a result. That is not very helpful, unless the thread is only a page or two long.

I He's right, it would be really cool if we could choose to search by thread title, or by entire thread; and also by more recent posts. Advanced search features would greatly improve CoasterBuzz. That would really help. Searching in the site is pretty difficult sometimes.

Not that I am complaining or anything.

How often are you guys doing those kinds of searches though? (Jeff could probably tell us from the stats.) I understand that sometimes you want to find an old thread where something was mentioned, but I feel like that happens rarely. Most of the time, the active threads are the only thing worth looking at.

Well, the infrequency with which I search for something is directly influenced by the lack of usefulness of the existing search process. That is, it's not very usable, so I almost never use it.

If it were made useful, who knows, perhaps I still wouldn't use it very much. But improving search was the only suggestion I could think of that hasn't yet been mentioned in this thread.

I think a list of recently active topics across all of the forums is useful. gives you a quick at-a-glance without having to click through each forum to see what is new.

Recent topics (link at the top of the page)